This column is awesome. A poll told me so.

Without polls, Teddy Roosevelt “was stunned by the margin of victory” in 1904, a political science professor said. (Universal Images Group)

More than 65 percent of you are going to find this column "awesome."

I know this because of an online poll I conducted. The poll read:

I'm going to write a column about this poll. How great do you think that column will be?

Really great

Awesome

The poll had a margin of error of +/- (who the heck knows, it was done on the Internet).

The subject of this column, which nearly 35 percent of you predicted will be "really great," is this: I don't like polls. They've become omnipresent and annoying. Given where we are in the presidential campaign, you can't swing a fishing pole without hitting one.

If you haven't been paying attention to the 9,575,432 presidential polls conducted so far this year, that one guy is ever-so-slightly ahead of that other guy, but it's pretty much within the margin of error. So now you're an informed member of the electorate.

Polls, in my opinion, are human impatience taken to its logical extreme. We could wait to learn who wins the election once the votes are tallied, but WE MUST KNOW NOW!! We're like kids in the days before Christmas trying to peel back a corner of wrapping paper to get a glimpse at what the present might be.

So what would happen if all the polls went away?

"If you had a world without polls, we'd still be interested in the horse race," said John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. "Before we had scientific polling, journalists still were interested in the horse race; they still were trying to figure out who was winning and losing. They just tended to be wrong a lot more."

Geer said the news media in the days before Gallup polls and online surveys would gauge a candidate's election potential by the size of crowds at political rallies, how excited supporters seemed to be or by mailing out ballots for readers to fill out and return.

"(Teddy) Roosevelt, when he won (in 1904), was stunned by the margin of victory," Geer said. "You had indicators back then, but they were very, very messy indicators."

I understand the natural drive — particularly among journalists — to figure out which side is winning, but does that information mean anything to voters?

If a presidential poll shows a candidate losing, that candidate's supporters now rush to rail against the pollsters and accuse them of skewing data. The campaigns themselves respond to unfavorable polls by citing their own "internal polling" that invariably shows something more positive. (Due to cuts in our satirical poll budget, I was unable to do an internal poll on how awesome this column would be.)

But Geer steadfastly believes polls add to the depth of the nation's political conversation.

"They augment it so we know what the public's thinking about," he said. "And then politicians can respond to what the public is thinking. The polls also provide opportunities to interpret elections so you can get a sense of why somebody might be doing well or not be doing well."

Again, Geer turned to pre-polling history to show the need for public opinion. George Washington, wanting to know what people thought about his new government, would tour the countryside on horseback, talking to people face to face. Abraham Lincoln once said, "Our government rests in public opinion," and he would hold weekly meetings with citizens to hear their views.

OK, fine, so maybe polls aren't completely worthless.

But given the neck-and-neck nature of this presidential campaign — it has been like watching a months-long NASCAR race where neither car pulls away — couldn't we at least make the polls more interesting?

Consider, for example, this survey conducted by XBIZ.net, the adult entertainment industry's "top social network." It found that 69 percent of people in the pornography industry favor President Barack Obama, compared with only 13 percent who favor Mitt Romney. (I assume the other 18 percent responded with inappropriate, guttural sex sounds.)

Now, that's a survey that people can get excited about!

In an effort to further pizazz up the available polling data, I posed the following question in another online survey:

Which presidential candidate would you most like to push into a kiddie pool filled with tapioca pudding?

The results spell potential trouble for the Romney campaign. Almost 80 percent of voters want to see the GOP candidate take a tapioca plunge.

But don't worry. Internal polling at Romney headquarters in Boston would probably show that Obama is perceived as "soft on pudding."